Monday, December 6, 2010

This public beta is intended to give (brave) Mixxx users a chance to try out some new features and help us find bugs. We do not recommend using beta software for live performance because there will be bugs. You can help improve Mixxx by reporting any bugs you find.

Important: Mixxx 1.9.0 beta1 will upgrade your library to a new format. This will make it incompatible with Mixxx 1.8.1. In order to try out Mixxx 1.9.0 beta1 you should upgrade to Mixxx 1.8.2, which we are also announcing today. You can switch back and forth between Mixxx 1.9.0 and Mixxx 1.8.2 with no trouble.

Among the new features in 1.9.0 Beta1 are:

Shoutcast / Icecast support

Mixxx can now broadcast over the internet (heavily requested feature)

External Mixer Support

The new Sound Hardware preferences pane allows you to route each playback deck separately, which allows you to use Mixxx with an external mixer.

ReplayGain normalization

A user from our forum worked closely with our developers to fully implement volume normalization, including performing the ReplayGain analysis for tracks which are not tagged.

Waveform Gain

The scrolling waveforms now scale according to the channel gain for better visual feedback.

Key lock buttons

Formerly known as "pitch-independent time stretch", there are now easily accessible key-lock buttons for each for deck.

Revamped default skin

Since the original source material for the Outline Netbook skin was lost eons ago, our artist completely redid it from scratch and tweaked it for better visibility. The new skin has also added EQ kill switches.

Faster library scanning - The library scanner should perform much better on large libraries.

Inline Editing - double click any item in the track table to edit its contents.

Record in MP3/Ogg - Now your recordings can be saved in either MP3 or Ogg/Vorbis format.

New MIDI mappings:

Vestax Typhoon

Hercules DJ Console Mk4

Numark MIXTRACK

Pioneer CDJ-350

Updated MIDI mappings:

Hercules DJ Control MP3

Hercules DJ Control e2

Hercules DJ Control Steel

Vestax VCI-100

Reloop Digital Jockey 2

Tons of bug fixes and performance improvements!

Mixxx 1.8.2 has a wide variety of bug fixes, performance improvements, and the same MIDI mapping updates that 1.9.0 beta1 has.

The Mixxx team would like to give a shout out to these up-and-coming contributors who had a huge hand in helping make 1.9.0 awesome (in alphabetical order):

Irwin Céspedes

Vittorio Colao

Joseph Colosimo

Bill Good

Anders Gunnarson

Tobias Rafreider

Owen Williams

Fundraiser

We're making great progress on our 1.9.0 Build Server fund, but we still need your help! This project will finance a dedicated build server that we will use to create nightly builds and automate our release process. This means the development team will have way more time to focus on making Mixxx better instead of dealing with packaging. Money raised will go to cover the cost of the server, and any leftover money will cover other ongoing expenses like web hosting, and otherwise help keep Mixxx rocking!

New Ubuntu PPAs
We've moved our official Mixxx repository for Ubuntu to a new PPA to increase security. The old repository is still online for now, but Ubuntu users will have to follow the instructions on our downloads page (click the Ubuntu download link) to get the new versions of Mixxx we've just released. There's also a separate Mixxx betas PPA, for brave souls.

Bugs

We depend on feedback from our users to guide Mixxx's development, so please file any bugs you find in this beta release on the Mixxx bug tracker. If you don't file a bug for the beta, don't be surprised when it isn't fixed in the final version!

Join Mixxx!

We're always looking for new contributors who are interested in working on Mixxx. If you're a programmer or artist and want to work with a creative, enthusiastic team, hop on our IRC channel (#mixxx on Freenode) or sign up for our developers' mailing list.

18 comments:

Superb News.Can we get a detailed changelog for 1.8.2 please? Would like to update Mixxx' listing on my favorite download site but beeing required to provide a changelog. Thanks and keep up that good work.